What is a cortado coffee?

There’s a definite trend in coffee consumption towards stronger drinks with more coffee and less milk. As coffee gets better generally, our taste is for more  flavour in our cup and less dilution, thus, the latte is giving way to the flat white, the cafe au lait is yielding to the macchiato and we are looking for new alternatives, as we seek to make our caffeine fix smoother and stronger.

The most recent player in this trend is the cortado, which emanates from the Basque Country in Northern Spain, where cortado (past participle of cortar, meaning cut) or café cortado describes a strong coffee drink which is half espresso and half heated milk. The milk “cuts” through the acidity of the coffee leaving enough bite to make the coffee interesting and satisfying, but steering away from bitterness and allowing the milk fats to coat and round out some of the carbon notes in the (often over-roasted coffee) served in the region. The term is widely used in Spain, Portugal and Cuba and in the past year or two it has spread through the hippest coffee spots of Europe and the USA.